10 Top Tools for Novelists
The software featured in this article is designed to meet the specialised needs of a budding novelist. There's the finest open source distraction-free tools, software designed to create visual novels, and tools to help capture and visualise ideas.

Openbravo is an ERP business solution for small and medium sized companies. Its database structure is originally based on Compiere. Openbravo uses a fully Web based client/server architecture, and can be used from any Web browser. It has support for PostgreSQL and Oracle database back-ends. It is currently available in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. Read more

an extensible network statistics collector. it puts the network interface in promiscuous mode and feeds the data stream (after it strips off the appropriate protocol headers), it then displays the results at speficied intervals, either in a "progress bar" mode or as raw statistics

a flexible and extensible network measurement tool (meter). It can be used for accounting, delay/loss measurement, packet capturing and much more. The main advantage over other existing tools is that it can be easily extended due to its modular (class-based) structure and dynamic loadable packet processing and information export modules

NetworkControl is a utility that allows you to control and monitor your network interfaces, including wireless ones. NetworkControl also provides the connection IP, configuration and statistics (gleaned from "ifconfig" and updated each second), and provides graphic signal levels for wireless interfaces, handy for evaluating a system of wireless devices.

NetXMS is a new and rapidly developing monitoring system, released under GPL2 license. It can be used for monitoring entire IT infrastructure, starting with SNMP-capable hardware (like switches and routers) and ending with applications on your servers.

lets you monitor NFS requests to any given machine, or the entire local network. It mostly monitors NFS client traffic (NFS requests); it also monitors the NFS reply traffic from a server in order to measure the response time for each RPC

a system and network monitoring software that runs on Unix systems and can poll network and system devices. It is capable of monitoringnameservers, web ports, host performance, syslogs, radius servers, BGP peers, etc. New monitors can be added easily (via a C or Perl API)

an interpreter of a declarative rule-based language designed for construction of state and event monitoring applications. For the purpose of constructing event streams and performing rule administration, it supports authenticated and encrypted peer-to-peer communication over TCP/IP, including encrypted file transfers, store-and-forward message queues, and remote command execution

Nuhe is a rule based log monitoring system, which is capable of action when rules are matched againsts log(s) activity. Default Nuhe mode is to run on background (daemon), but it can also be used in foreground and log analyzer mode. Log analyzer mode just analyzes given logs and prints results to stdout; no action is taken when Nuhe is in analyzer mode.

OpMon is a network and system monitoring application based on Nagios with extended support for capacity planning, SLA, SLM, network discovery, service catalogs, report schedule, and much more. OpMon provides a GUI for Nagios as well as full multi-language support.

PagePoker is a perl package / class file that defines a browser agent with many powerful features for monitoring and testing websites, including elaborate failure handling that can send email and trigger snmp traps.

Pandora is a flexible monitoring platform. Pandora addresses current needs for improving Internet middleware and infrastructure by providing both in-depth understanding of network usage and metrics to compare existing protocols. Pandora is flexible and easy to use and deploy.

PaquitoMeter is a small program that shows you statistics about your network transfers. You can choose between interfaces installed in your system, your language and the maximum speed your connection supports.

pcapsipdump is a tool for dumping (recording) SIP sessions (and RTP traffic, if available) to disk in a fashion similar to "tcpdump -w" (the format is exactly the same). The difference is that the data is saved with one file per SIP session. Even if there are thousands of concurrect SIP sessions, each goes to separate file.